Definitions of Accountability
The conventional definition of "accountability" is synonymous with liability or answerability: there's a sense of obligation or responsibility to meet a determined standard.
The concept of accountability as relevant to productive theory is related to this definition. In this usage, accountability explains (at least in part) the way knowledge is formulated and shared within a community or thought collective. It is the way community's create, regulate and validate knowledge. People, texts, theories, etc. are all accountable to and for: to sources and for what is produced. As "members" of communities, the habits and behaviors of the communities influence the sources and the productions.
Accountability can be limiting, in that certain ways of formulating knowledge are valued over others (potentially to their complete exclusion), but also creates common assumptions that make communication effective and efficient (and this may foster creativity). For example, scientific discourse is accountable to empirical evidence. While this excludes other types of evidence, it also validates the discourse within the community because the members of the community commonly value empirical evidence and so all discourse uses empirical evidence to create knowledge. A piece of creative writing would not be given as an example of scientific discourse because it has different accountabilities that render it inappropriate for this use.
(Less related to my focus here, accountability is used in education as a policy for holding schools and teachers responsible for their students' academic performance.)
Evolution of Term
The development of the word into a concept can be traced back to Ludwik Fleck (1935/1979), a Polish physician, who observed thought collectives and thought styles. Members of thought collectives have similar formulations of knowledge, or thought styles, and so an adequate explanation of phenomena for one thought collective may be inadequate for another thought collective (scientific discourse, for example, relies on empirical evidence). The thought styles are upheld through active and passive constraints, which new information or experiences must negotiate in order to be integrated - some things are appropriate within the thought collective and some things are not.
Charles Bazerman (1988) builds on Fleck's idea of the communal nature of epistemology to develop the concept of accountability. For Bazerman, accountability is based upon facts that are generated through active constraints, which are habits, patterns and representations, that reflect passive constraints, which limit what can "properly" be said based on the active constraints. So, if scientific discourse is accountable to empirical evidence, claims must be supported by facts and natural evidence. A thought collective with a scientific thought style would find it "proper" to make claims based upon empirical evidence, because this is a passive constraint that has developed from the collective's ways of formulating knowledge. While other thought collectives have alternative sources of evidence, to use this evidence in a scientific thought collective would be inappropriate. (In fact, the members of a thought collective may not even think to use alternate evidence; their experience within the thought collective shapes how and what they see.) Accountability, then, plays a significant role in how knowledge is formulated and shared.
Louise Wetherbee Phelps (2003) expands upon Bazerman's account of accountability, developing the idea of multiple layered and conflicting accountabilities. For example, my sister is stay-at-home mother and a grad student finishing her dissertation in engineering; "stay-at-home mother" discourse is accountable to daily experience with the family, while "dissertating-engineer-grad student" discourse is accountable to lab experiments and empirical evidence. To be apart of both communities, my sister must negotiate these sometimes conflicting identities. In her work, Phelps discusses the potentially conflicting accountabilities of feminist scholars. Additionally, theory is accountable TO someone or something and FOR something (5). The TO/FOR designations are context dependent and may change over time.
Phelps (2011) also discusses the accountabilities of theory, which is accountable for what happens when it is used. Over time, as a theory is used by different people in different ways, the accountability will change; e.g. Marxist theories of 1850 cannot be held strictly accountable for the consequences of the use of today's Marxist theories. According to Phelps' talk, in general a theory is accountable for its concepts' adequacy, affordances, illumination or disclosure, and generativity, fertility, clarity and negotiability.
Some interesting applications of "accountability" can be found in: Traces of a Stream by Jacqueline Jones Royster, which focuses on nineteenth-century African American women writers and their conflicting accountabilities as women disempowered by racial and gender inequality but persevering through education and literacy.
"The Social Construction of Accountability: Radiologists and their Record-Keeping Practices" by Elizabeth Yakel, which studies the accountabilities of record keeping and how they may conflict with the accountabilities of the records themselves.
Related Terms
thought collective* (is this the same as a community of practice?)
thought style*
active constraints
passive constraints
conflicting accountabilities
these terms are central to the origins of the concept, but are not used in association with the term today
Sources:
Bazerman, C. (1988). Shaping written knowledge: The genre and activity of the experimental article in science. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
Fleck, L. (1979). The gensis and development of a scientific fact. (T.J. Trenn & R.K. Merton). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. (Original work published 1935).
Phelps, L. W. (2003). How we take responsibility for inquiry: An account of accountability, Conference on College Composition and Communication. NYC.
Phelps, L.W. (2011). Practical observations about how to theorize: Functions and strategies of conceptual inquiry, Syracuse University. NY.
Royster, J.J. (2000). Traces of a stream. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press.
Yakel, E. (2001). The social construction of accountability: Radiologists and their record-keeping practices. The Information Society, 17(4), 233-245.
The conventional definition of "accountability" is synonymous with liability or answerability: there's a sense of obligation or responsibility to meet a determined standard.
The concept of accountability as relevant to productive theory is related to this definition. In this usage, accountability explains (at least in part) the way knowledge is formulated and shared within a community or thought collective. It is the way community's create, regulate and validate knowledge. People, texts, theories, etc. are all accountable to and for: to sources and for what is produced. As "members" of communities, the habits and behaviors of the communities influence the sources and the productions.
Accountability can be limiting, in that certain ways of formulating knowledge are valued over others (potentially to their complete exclusion), but also creates common assumptions that make communication effective and efficient (and this may foster creativity). For example, scientific discourse is accountable to empirical evidence. While this excludes other types of evidence, it also validates the discourse within the community because the members of the community commonly value empirical evidence and so all discourse uses empirical evidence to create knowledge. A piece of creative writing would not be given as an example of scientific discourse because it has different accountabilities that render it inappropriate for this use.
(Less related to my focus here, accountability is used in education as a policy for holding schools and teachers responsible for their students' academic performance.)
Evolution of Term
The development of the word into a concept can be traced back to Ludwik Fleck (1935/1979), a Polish physician, who observed thought collectives and thought styles. Members of thought collectives have similar formulations of knowledge, or thought styles, and so an adequate explanation of phenomena for one thought collective may be inadequate for another thought collective (scientific discourse, for example, relies on empirical evidence). The thought styles are upheld through active and passive constraints, which new information or experiences must negotiate in order to be integrated - some things are appropriate within the thought collective and some things are not.
Charles Bazerman (1988) builds on Fleck's idea of the communal nature of epistemology to develop the concept of accountability. For Bazerman, accountability is based upon facts that are generated through active constraints, which are habits, patterns and representations, that reflect passive constraints, which limit what can "properly" be said based on the active constraints. So, if scientific discourse is accountable to empirical evidence, claims must be supported by facts and natural evidence. A thought collective with a scientific thought style would find it "proper" to make claims based upon empirical evidence, because this is a passive constraint that has developed from the collective's ways of formulating knowledge. While other thought collectives have alternative sources of evidence, to use this evidence in a scientific thought collective would be inappropriate. (In fact, the members of a thought collective may not even think to use alternate evidence; their experience within the thought collective shapes how and what they see.) Accountability, then, plays a significant role in how knowledge is formulated and shared.
Louise Wetherbee Phelps (2003) expands upon Bazerman's account of accountability, developing the idea of multiple layered and conflicting accountabilities. For example, my sister is stay-at-home mother and a grad student finishing her dissertation in engineering; "stay-at-home mother" discourse is accountable to daily experience with the family, while "dissertating-engineer-grad student" discourse is accountable to lab experiments and empirical evidence. To be apart of both communities, my sister must negotiate these sometimes conflicting identities. In her work, Phelps discusses the potentially conflicting accountabilities of feminist scholars. Additionally, theory is accountable TO someone or something and FOR something (5). The TO/FOR designations are context dependent and may change over time.
Phelps (2011) also discusses the accountabilities of theory, which is accountable for what happens when it is used. Over time, as a theory is used by different people in different ways, the accountability will change; e.g. Marxist theories of 1850 cannot be held strictly accountable for the consequences of the use of today's Marxist theories. According to Phelps' talk, in general a theory is accountable for its concepts' adequacy, affordances, illumination or disclosure, and generativity, fertility, clarity and negotiability.
Some interesting applications of "accountability" can be found in:
Traces of a Stream by Jacqueline Jones Royster, which focuses on nineteenth-century African American women writers and their conflicting accountabilities as women disempowered by racial and gender inequality but persevering through education and literacy.
"The Social Construction of Accountability: Radiologists and their Record-Keeping Practices" by Elizabeth Yakel, which studies the accountabilities of record keeping and how they may conflict with the accountabilities of the records themselves.
Related Terms
thought collective* (is this the same as a community of practice?)
thought style*
active constraints
passive constraints
conflicting accountabilities
Sources:
Fleck, L. (1979). The gensis and development of a scientific fact. (T.J. Trenn & R.K. Merton). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. (Original work published 1935).
Phelps, L. W. (2003). How we take responsibility for inquiry: An account of accountability, Conference on College Composition and Communication. NYC.
Phelps, L.W. (2011). Practical observations about how to theorize: Functions and strategies of conceptual inquiry, Syracuse University. NY.
Royster, J.J. (2000). Traces of a stream. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press.
Yakel, E. (2001). The social construction of accountability: Radiologists and their record-keeping practices. The Information Society, 17(4), 233-245.